Posted on 09/28/2004 1:34:36 PM PDT by jern
The ad text:
WHY DOES AMERICA’S TOP POLLSTER KEEP GETTING IT WRONG?
If John Kerry believed in the Gallup poll, he might as well give up. A couple of weeks ago,a highly publicized Gallup poll of “likely voters” showed President Bush with a staggering 14-point lead.
But wait a minute. Seven other polls of likely voters were released that same week. On average, they showed Bush with just a three-point lead. No one else came close to Gallup’s figures. And this isn’t the first time the prestigious Gallup survey has been out on a limb with pro-Bush findings.
What’s going on here? It’s not exactly that Gallup’s cooking the books. Rather, they are refusing to fix a longstanding problem with their likely voter methodology.
Simply put, Gallup’s methodology has predicted lately that Republican turnout on Election Day is likely to exceed Democrats’ by six to eight percentage point. But exit polls show otherwise: in each of the last two Presidential elections, Democratic turnout exceeded Republican by four to five points. That discrepancy alone can account for nearly all of Bush’s phantom 14-point lead.
This is more than just a numbers game. Poll results profoundly affect a campaign’s news coverage as well as the public’s perception of the candidates.
Two media outlets, CNN and USA Today, bear special responsibility for this problem. They pay for many of Gallup’s surveys, in exchange for the right to add their names to the polls and trumpet the results first. They wind up acting as unquestioning promotional partners, rather than as critical journalists. The public would be better served if journalists asked some tough questions, beginning with the Gallup Organization, which has been asked to select the audience for the Bush-Kerry “town meeting” debate on October 8.
George Gallup Jr., son of the poll’s founder, was the longtime head of the company and now directs its non-profit research center. Why hasn’t he pushed for an update of the company’s likely voter modeling, which his own father pioneered in the 1950s?
Gallup, who is a devout evangelical Christian, has been quoted as calling his polling “a kind of ministry.” And a few months ago, he said “the most profound purpose of polls is to see how people are responding to God.”
We thought the purpose is to faithfully and factually report public opinion.
Glad to see MoveOn waste some $$$
They should change their name to MoveNothing...
The Anti-Christian left showing their true colors.
Full-page ads in the NYT are not cheap. That they would spend that kind of money on such a peripheral issue suggests to me that they have tons of it to spend. I wonder where it comes from?
They are getting frantic fellow Freepers
Prelude to how they will react when Bush wins by 10 points.
"The machines are wrong! Kerry won. We will keep counting until he does."
This is weird. Even if the poll is wrong won't we know on election day? I guess they are just trying to keep the base from giving up. Fine. I cannot wait to see their ad on November 3rd.
Must be nice being in the ad business during election time.
whAT A BUNCH OF PANSIES
But if Gallup had Kerry in the lead, they'd be kissing his behind.
God, they are SO transparent. I love seeing them sweat!
Some guy from Gallup was on CNN ripping into MoveOn.org for being incorrect on several points. I though Judy Woodruff was going to cry.
Where was their ad when Kerry was ahead?
The typical liberal left -- moaning and groaning, and certainly cannot deal with the truth. It is rough when the media is losing its ability to spin, block and manage the news, and REALITY LEAKS OUT!
They just cannot handle it --- LOVING EVERY SECOND OF IT!!! :-)
"Moving Money" is more like it. In this case, from one liberal group to another. It's like pushing butter in a bag.
I wonder if their next ad will slam the PEW polls?
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1229586/posts
I don't think the average of 7 other polls was 3 points am i wrong?
And the Moveon.org ad runs the same day that the PEW Poll shows Bush BACK up by 8.
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